Description
Selfie City (2014), a research project led by Lev Manovich at the Software Studies Initiative (City University of New York), investigates the style of self-portraits (selfies) in five cities across the world: Bangkok, Berlin, Moscow, New York, and São Paulo. The team analyzed 3,200 selfies from Instagram using a mix of theoretical, artistic, and quantitative methods — including Amazon Mechanical Turk workers for demographic coding and custom software for measuring head tilt, smile intensity, and eye openness. The project found that women take significantly more selfies than men in every city, and that people in Bangkok and São Paulo smile the most while Moscow smiles the least. The interactive website lets users explore the dataset along multiple visual dimensions.
